Thom Gunn bio explores joys, complexities of modern gay life
‘Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life’By Michael Nottc.2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux$40/720 pages A confession: Until reading “Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life,” I hadn’t known much about the accomplished, controversial gay poet’s life or read many of his poems.
But this first biography makes me feel like I know him and his large body of work intimately. Michael Nott, coeditor of “The Letters of Thom Gunn,” draws on interviews with friends and family, as well as Gunn’s letters, notebooks, and diaries, to tell the triumphs and tragedies of his life.
Born in England in 1929 to journalist parents, when he was 15, he and his younger brother Ander found their mother dead from suicide.
He would not discuss this tragic event in his poetry for years, including one of his last poems “My Mother’s Pride.” He published his first book of poems, “Fighting Terms,” while still an undergraduate at Cambridge University.
